Inpatient hospital services for the care of persons with major mental disorders such as schizophrenia continue to represent a large proportion of health care expenditures in the United States today. Research conducted during the past two decades has examined existing alternative systems of community-based mental health care and various individual components of these systems in an attempt to cut costs and to improve services to persons with severe and chronic mental illness. However, few studies have sought to illuminate the interplay between informal or natural supports and networks, formal service delivery, and client outcomes. Dr. Holschuh is currently conducting the first segment of a pilot study which is the initial stage of a research project to examine over time the interrelationships among social support, social network and service network characteristics, and adjustment to community living of persons with chronic mental illness. Current efforts involve the development and initial pretesting in Dane County of instrumentation to gather data on the personal social networks and service delivery networks of focal subjects who are clients of the public mental health system in Wisconsin. Instruments to collect data regarding knowledge of these networks from network members and service providers are being developed also. This proposal seeks funding for the second segment of the pilot project which is a methodological and exploratory study with the following specific aims: l) to pretest a valid and reliable instrument to use in face-to-face interviews with clients in 3 Wisconsin counties that are representative of rural, urban, and minority populations in the state 2) to pretest valid, reliable, and cost-efficient methods of obtaining collateral data on focal subjects' social networks from network members and service providers 3) to conduct a comparative descriptive analysis of the "rural vs. urban" personal and service delivery networks of focal subjects 4) to begin to explore the relationships between informal social networks and formal service delivery networks of focal subjects using an adaptation of Litwak's theory of the interdependence between primary groups and formal organizations 5) to begin to explore the bidirectional relationships between and among network variables and client "outcomes" (social/psychological functioning, satisfaction with services, quality of life). This study employs a nonexperimental, cross-sectional design. Subjects recruited from county-level Community Support Programs will be 18 years or older and meet the state definition of "chronic mental illness." In addition to participating in interviews, clients will be asked to fill out brief questionnaires that ask about satisfaction with services and quality of life. Data on clients' social functioning will be obtained from service providers through written questionnaires and record reviews. The primary objective is the development of network instrumentation for use in the study of this population and community support mental health services. The exploratory data analyses will guide the development of testable hypotheses for a larger, more rigorously designed study to be conducted in the future.